Spammer's Porsche up for grabs

[moki]

Justice!! God I hate spammers...

from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3581435.stm

.....

Spammer's Porsche up for grabs

AOL says the Porsche has "symbolic value"
Internet giant AOL has ratcheted up the war against unsolicited e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup - an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche.

AOL won the car - a $47,000 Boxster S - as part of a court settlement against an unnamed e-mailer last year.

"We'll take cars, houses, boats - whatever we can find and get a hold of," said AOL's Randall Boe.

According to Mr Boe, the Porsche's previous owner made more than $1m by sending junk e-mail.

Hitting them where it hurts

AOL is one of the noisiest opponents of the evasive spam trade, and this month joined forces with Microsoft, Yahoo and Earthlink to sue hundreds of spammers.

Seizure of property is becoming a major tactic in these lawsuits, since guilty spammers often protest their inability to pay large fines.

The Porsche-owning spammer, whose identity remains confidential, was one of a group sued last year for having sent 1 billion junk messages to AOL members, pitching pornography, college degrees, cable TV descramblers and other products.

Mr Boe said the Porsche was seized mainly for its symbolic value, as the obvious fruit of an illegal trade.

The Porsche sweepstake lasts until 8 April, and will be open only to those who were AOL members when it was first announced.

 

[Backslide]

SWEEEEEEEETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT they should take everything that guy has

 

[gkpk]

Good job.
Hate those damn spammers.......all that junkmail pisses me off.
There's got to be a way to end all that crap. :angry:

 

[gibu]

Spam doesn't bother me so much. I don't get as much as others probably do, and the problem with spam is it's our fault. If it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it. Ask anyone that complains about it if they have ever purchased anything from it or even responded to it in any way. If they haven't then sympathise with them, but if they have then tell them to shut up about it. :thumbs:

 

[moki]

Spam doesn't bother me so much. I don't get as much as others probably do, and the problem with spam is it's our fault. If it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it. Ask anyone that complains about it if they have ever purchased anything from it or even responded to it in any way. If they haven't then sympathise with them, but if they have then tell them to shut up about it. :thumbs:

I disagree. Spammers send unwanted emails at little to no expense to them, and at great expense to everyone who receives it, from people having to weed through the junk in their in-box, to sys admins having to spend time stemming the flood of junk mail, to companies who foot the bandwidth and server strain bill for unsolicited emails.

With paper junk mail, it at least cost the company something to design, print, and then mail the pieces (both manpower and postage). This economic barrier acts like a natural restriction on the abuse of that medium.

That all goes away with junk emails. They take little to no time to send out, using automated programs to do the mailing, and automated programs to do the email address harvesting. They use the network connections other people have paid for, and strain the servers other people have paid for in order to clog people's in-boxes with crap they don't want.

What you're saying is akin to stating that someone who pick-pockets people for a living is *our* fault because it is profitable for them to do so. I don't accept that victimization.

Unsolicited faxes were made illegal for a reason, and those at least cost the sender something (the long distance phone call to send the fax). Here we're talking about something on a much greater scale.

The problem is that making it illegal will do very little to stem the flow. Folks will just move their servers outside of the USA to a country that could care less if they are spamming.

I receive over 1,000 spam emails a day. That is not a misprint -- and that's just for my personal email account at my office, other employees receive similar amounts. We spent a lot of time installing and tweaking anti-spam software just to keep our in-boxes from being flooded to the point of uselessness.

Filtering the spam doesn't change the fact that our servers still need to process the spam, wasting CPU power and disk space, our net connections are still being hijacked to transmit the spam, which chews up bandwidth that we pay dearly for. Not to mention the time and aggravation at combating spam, and weeding out our in-boxes for the thankfully few dozen spam emails that make it past our filters on a daily basis.

 

[gibu]

Hey, I feel for ya Moki. It hits you way harder then it ever will me. The thing is though, even if it doesn't cost the spammers as much as junk mail does, it still costs them something. It's a whole industry and the spammers often are just doing it for the person advertising through spam, so they charge the person actually selling the item, and the spammer them selves have some cost for the bandwith to send it out. Even if it just cost $10 to do a million names they still wouldn't do it if they lost $10 every time they tried it. How many $10 bills will you just throw away before you quit doing it? The problem is they get a pretty good sized response in proportion to the cost. It's very cost effective for them. The spammers get a good enough response they can charge a reasonable amount for their services and it becomes quite profitable for them. The people that make it profitable are the culprits here. Theres always someone thats going to make a buck if it's there to be made no matter how it's made.

This isn't a solution of course, you will never stop everyone from buying from them. It's mearly an observation as to who the fault lies with.

 

[AVB]

You must be a popular guy outside of CP moki. I admin a 350 node network and we average about 1800 spams a day for the whole company based on our filter reports. I can't imagine 1K just for my mailbox, the server would overlaod if that was true for everybody here!

 

[moki]

You must be a popular guy outside of CP moki. I admin a 350 node network and we average about 1800 spams a day for the whole company based on our filter reports. I can't imagine 1K just for my mailbox, the server would overlaod if that was true for everybody here!

Unfortunately, I and my company have necessarily public email addresses. It doesn't take long for you to get stuck on every spammer's list under the sun.

Gibu, to send out 10,000,000 spam emails, it costs approximately $1,000. The rate of return that is needed in order to make it profitable is so miniscule, and the costs of spam so unfairly placed on the recipient's networks, servers, and in boxes that it is patently unjust. There are enough idiots in the world that if all you need is a 0.0001% return as is the case here, the economics are clear.

The problem is that the burden is unfairly placed on the remaining 99.9999% of the people who receive these junk emails. Is it okay to have your car stolen because there is a profitable chop shop business? Is that the fault of everyone who drives a car?

 

[vewyphishy]

A $40-$50 thousand car seizure vs. the millions he made? MORE! TAKE MORE!!! His punishment should be to spend the rest of his life manually filtering out spam mail for people.

I hate spam. My old school email account (which I still use from time to time) used to be spam free. I only used it when I was signing up for something like online bill pay. If it was registration of any other kind, I used my hotmail. It was great because that worked as a filter in itself. Only pertinent emails would make it into my main account and junk would be sent to my hotmail. Then once a week, I'd sign on to hotmail and just delete everything.

That all changed a few months ago... and I have no idea how. Now, my main account gets on average, 200 pieces of junk mail a day. I constantly add new senders to the junk list, but damn... there's only so much you can do. It's a real pisser.

:angry: :angry: :angry:

 

[PuroBrat]

Spyware, Data Miners are partly responsible for that I am sure Phishy. Data miners will search for e:mail addresses and add them to a list. So if any computer anywhere in the world, had your e:Mail address in ot, and it got a DM on it, there ya go. Not only that, but some of the spamers have software that sends to any e:Mail address that contains a certain set of Characters. For instance, I have an email address that is bratde98@lycos.com, I get spam in there all the time that was sent to brat@... DaBrat@... bratlinks@... and it comes to me as well. This stuff is so automated right now it is silly. I have recieved many e:Mails trying to sell me the Spammers Dream Software so I can cash in on the Spamming Revolution. They make it so easy, a lot of the spammers out there making a killing are just Kids, anybody can do it. Telemarketers of the 21st Century, welcome to your future ???

 

[CoventryCat86]

AOL has a hell of a lot of nerve to whine and bitch about spam.

The most annoying and largest quantity of pop-ups I get on my computer are from none other than AOL.

I hate that piece of trash company.

 

[dixieland_conjunction]

That all changed a few months ago... and I have no idea how. Now, my main account gets on average, 200 pieces of junk mail a day. I constantly add new senders to the junk list, but damn... there's only so much you can do. It's a real pisser.

:angry: :angry: :angry:

Both unversities I've attended (undergrad and grad) sell their eMial lists. :lookup: Yup, seriously

Cheers,
Dixie

 

[vewyphishy]

That all changed a few months ago... and I have no idea how. Now, my main account gets on average, 200 pieces of junk mail a day. I constantly add new senders to the junk list, but damn... there's only so much you can do. It's a real pisser.

:angry: :angry: :angry:

Both unversities I've attended (undergrad and grad) sell their eMial lists. :lookup: Yup, seriously

Cheers,
Dixie

:0

Being that Univ. of Texas at Austin is the school account, I would hope that they don't sell off their lists. I mean, we don't NEED to. But if they did, would they sell them to people they know would spam us with viagra knockoffs and college diplomas? The latter seems more unlikely than the viagra.

*sigh*

Still sucks. In the last hour, I've receive 23 more. ???

 

[ShadMan]

Vewy - I just added you to all my spam lists just for being a TUer!

 

[dixieland_conjunction]

Being that Univ. of Texas at Austin is the school account, I would hope that they don't sell off their lists. I mean, we don't NEED to. But if they did, would they sell them to people they know would spam us with viagra knockoffs and college diplomas? The latter seems more unlikely than the viagra.

My schools were UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Charlotte - both fairly big schools (though we DID need the money!).

Anyway, they sell the list, then those folks sell their list, the those buyers sell their lists...etc.

Ya' never know who ends up with your address. Especially if you're a prime demographic like 18-24 male

Cheers,
Dixie